


Mercy

by mayfriend



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Brotherly Love, Canon Compliant, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Mercy Killing, Missing Scene, Oneshot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-24
Updated: 2018-11-24
Packaged: 2019-08-28 18:02:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16728234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayfriend/pseuds/mayfriend
Summary: Harvey loves his brother. That's why he has to be the one to kill him.





	Mercy

**Author's Note:**

> This show has just ripped my heart out and made mince meat out of it, so you guys get to suffer too.

The gun is heavy in his hands. It's the heaviest thing he's ever held. When they were kids, he and Tommy used to play with the empty hunting rifles and pretend to be cowboys, cops and robbers, superheroes. His childhood is remembered best a long, hazy summer day spent in the sunshine with Tommy. He thought he was an adult now, or near enough, big enough to stand on his own two feet, but he knows now how wrong he was. There is a child in his heart that is screaming and it takes everything he has not to scream along with him.

The bullets can't make the rifle weigh that much more. In fact, he knows they don't; at Thanksgiving he'd been able to heft the gun over his shoulder with ease, despite his reservations about hunting wild animals.

_(He's not Tommy,_ Sabrina had told him with wet-wounded eyes and a quaking voice, _he's something else.)_

He couldn't shoot that deer. His fingers went all slick-sweaty and his arms shook and his heartbeat pounded like drums in his ears. He certainly can't do this–

He wants to run after Sabrina. He wants to say _you owe me this,_  wants to tell her _I take it back, I'm not strong enough, help me._ He has done it a thousand times before, when he was too weak, too afraid, too fearful. He has done it a thousand times before, because Tommy was always right there behind him; the guiding hand on his back as he learned to ride a bike, the fond, familiar  _nerd_ when he needed friend, the rib-cracking hug when he'd had a hard day.

Tommy has been there for Harvey for sixteen years and never failed him, not once. Harvey will not fail him now. He cannot.

(What Harvey had wanted to ask, but hadn't had the strength to: _if this isn't Tommy, where is he? If the body on his bed is not him, then where is my brother?)_

(He doesn't ask because he doesn't want to know the answer.)

The door to Tommy's bedroom creaks as he pushes it open, loud and jarring and Harvey wants it to wake Tommy up. He always was a light sleeper. He wants the sound to rouse his brother from his bed and–

He doesn't know what he wants after that. He wants Tommy back. (Tommy isn't coming back.) He wants not to do this. He wants his big brother to save him one last time, just once more, and end him himself before he has to do this. He wants Tommy to take this terrible choice away for him, for his brother to wrap his hands around Harvey's neck and _squeeze_ , just like he did to Dad until he died for abandoning him in the mines, for not knowing immediately that whatever of him came back came back wrong. Harvey had wanted his brother back so badly that he'd settled for a shade. Harvey had wanted his brother back so badly that he'd have taken an empty shell.

He'd deserve it; he would deserve all of it.

(And isn't that something? Tommy was dead when that happened, and he was still protecting Harvey from their father. He doesn't deserve it, Tommy's love, Tommy's loyalty; he never did.)

Tommy is sleeping. The thing that is sleeping on Tommy's bed, that has Tommy's face and his smell and his warmth, doesn't stir.

He looks so himself. He looks like he has looked for the last sixteen years in sleep, his right arm tucked under his pillow like it always is and his hair sticking up a little at the back like it always has. His features are soft, relaxed - he looks like he's at peace. He looks like he's already dead.

Harvey clicks off the safety, and lets out a sob. His face is wet, smeared with tears he hasn't got the energy to wipe away and he can't do this, he can't do this, he can't-

_(Will it hurt him?)_

(Did it hurt him? Down in the mines? Where there was no air, no light, where the walls closed in like blackened lungs and the rocks fell hard and fast? How many bones did he break? How long did he lay there, broken and bleeding before the life leeched out of him? Did he call for Harvey, for their dad, for their mother? Tommy had always been her favourite. He had always been Harvey's favourite too. Why did Harvey run, why did Harvey run, why did he leave him alone in the dark, why didn't he just stay with him-) 

"I love you," he chokes out, as he lines up the barrel with Tommy's forehead. He waits one beat, two, for something to happen, for his brother to claw his way back from the land of the dead through the power of love and look at him with bright eyes like in the movies, like it always ends, except when it doesn't.

He doesn't. That is not how this story ends. Harvey should have known. 

"I love you so much," he says again, and he almost puts the gun down to reach out and touch him one last time, but he knows if he does that he won't pick it back up again. He's crying so hard that the world is a blur of colour, that Tommy's face is little more than a blur of pink and peach and brown.

_(Harvey! Harvey, run!)_

He clenches his teeth. His stomach contracts, twists like a living thing and he pulls the trigger.

**Author's Note:**

> Things Tommy Kinkle didn't deserve: that.


End file.
